Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Sports Competition & the Culture Wars

Recently I got a Moron
Alert warning me about the end of Western civilization. The Moron
Alert quoted Arnold Toynbee to prove that Western values are

collapsing
and cited the drafting of the first gay NFL player as the proof of the decline.
What fascinates me about this linkage is how people see sports as a reflection
and driver of culture. To many folks sports epitomize American values and can
be a harbinger of decay or progress.

The American self-narrative
about fairness and meritocracy—(talent + dream + hard work=success) is manifest
in athletic competition. The media coverage and movies memorialize these values
in their sports stories. At various times such as Olympics, sports even becomes
a surrogate for political and moral superiority across political systems and
countries.

This personal connection of
sports to identity mean athletic competition has been entwined with the American
culture wars around race, gender, religion and other differences for the last
100 years. Sports have often served as a weather vane for issues of inclusion
and fair chance against cultural bias to exclude individuals and groups from domains
of life. Athletics’ role is often symbolic; it can open paths for fame and
economic success but also provides a public morality play where the excluded
fight for the right to achieve acknowledgement and success through competition,
merit and fair rules.

This public battle for a fair
chance to compete in a brutally transparent environment marks sports convergence
with the American cultural narrative At certain points it even permitted sports
to nudge or move ahead of society. This ability to move ahead is not due to altruism.
First, athletic talent is at a premium in elite sports competition and market
pressure pushes owners and coaches to seek the best talent—period. Second many
individuals from lower economic or immigrant groups do not have fair access to
education and traditionally have chosen entertainment or sports as a way out. This
creates the incentive and reward for teams to open competition to excluded
individuals if individuals possess the talent and work ethics. It can even give
teams competitive advantages if they get to the population pools first.

This inclusion of the excluded
through sports does not transform society and can be premature, purely symbolic
and falsely reassuring. The case of Jesse Owens carrying the banner for the
United States against Germany in the 1936 Olympics illustrates such an anomaly.
His victories connected to no movement to change and his personal life never
could capitalize on the fame and achievement. However, the promotion of Jackie
Robinson from the Negro Leagues to be the first black player in the major
leagues both symbolized and fed a country-wide battle on civil rights and
including the excluded. His promotion and success set a precedent where many
other black players followed him to professional baseball.

Two recent controversies
illustrate the intersection of culture wars and sports competition. The St.
Louis Rams picked defensive end and SEC co-defensive player of the year MichaelSam in the 7th Round of the NFL draft. The pick was a straight up
football pick of a possibly marginal player with an upside. National controversy
erupted because Sam had come out as a gay football player several months
before. In being drafted and entering the NFL as a gay player, Sam challenges
what is regarded as one of the most homophobic and traditional male cultures in
sports and the country—of course that can have been said of the army a decade
ago.

Sam’s announcement and his
drafting lead to serious and hysterical discussions over the nature of American
culture. The nexus of the hard right assault against his draft is similar to
their resistance to gays in the military. Gay football players would subvert
the sacred violence and ritual brotherhood of the military or that most violent
of sports, football. To many on the American cultural right, this draft pick
defiles and endangers one of the last bastions of a traditional domain of
manhood linked to strength and violence and competition. The threat unfolds in
two ways. First, it publically permits such a person to enter the domain;
second and even more dangerous it means that the excluded persons might
actually prove that gay men can succeed in the world of manly violence and
competition, much as gay soldiers and basketball players succeed their domains.

This one action represents
only one play in a national long-term culture war over the role of gay
individuals in public and professional life. It also matters because it
challenges so many of the implicit stereotypes about being gay that deny gay
men the right to be considered male by traditional standards. Interestingly it
complements already widely acknowledged and accepted female athletes in
professional sports from basketball to tennis or golf. It also extends the
boundaries that courageous individuals have pushed in less public sports and
recently in professional basketball.

The point here lies in
extending the public and transparent morality play of American sports where
excluded individuals—East European immigrants in the twenties and thirties;
black players in the fifties and sixties; women in the eighties and nineties; Latino
and gay players today—these individuals consigned to the margins of society
prove their work ethic, talent, capacity for loyalty, self-discipline and
teamwork and for achievement under pressure before the millions who follow the
sports. Their success in sports undermine many of the character stereotypes
that people use to exclude them from other fields.

This public morality play also
pushes out in the culture at large where celebrity and role models influence
not just citizens but also children. A critical line from Jackie Robinson movie
42
where Branch Rickey tells Robinson, “I saw a young white boy wanting to
be like a black man.” This stood as a revolutionary moment for American culture
in the fifties, but feels a norm today where white children aspire to the
images of minority athletes.

But the proof of players
competing conquers one symbolic layer—individuals can prove that he or she can
compete in the game with its rules and clarity of competition and skills. But
another level of power looms that involves moving into layers of authority and
ownership. When the Brooklyn Dodgers drafted Jackie Robinson as the first black
baseball player to play in the major leagues from the Negro leagues, the team
had to fight against other owners who threatened boycotts and banishment to the
owner Branch Rickey. At a critical level, owners could “own” players and still
be racists or sexists and exploit the players for the profit of the team. Rickey
deployed power and wiles and courage to achieve his goal and he proved that
Negro players made his team better; but it took power to make the change stick.

Now the battle moves not just
along the lines of gay players, but moving minority players who dominate the
largest revenue college and professional sports into positions of authority in
coaching and management and ultimately ownership. This involves another level
of culture battle. It involves not just opening up competition, but demanding
power not just employment. For instance the NFL created the Rooney rule to
require NFL teams to interview minority head coaches when an opening existed.
The rule resulted in immediate gains as well as the slow and steady progression
of minority coaches up the coaching ladder in professional basketball, football
and college basketball and at a much slower rate college football.

Now the culture wars in sports
is playing out at a very different and startling level—ownership. For years
people have known that the NBA owner of the Los Angeles Clippers Donald Sterling had a long history of discriminatory behavior against minorities in his real
estate holdings and rumored in his NBA actions. NBA great Elgin Baylor termed
his team a “plantation culture.” The NBA benignly looked the other way under
his friend Commissioner David Stern; but four months ago Sterling was caught on
tape slurring minorities and blacks. The slurs were caught in a very strange
almost poignant and very confused private conversation with his girl friend. He
concludes by asking his mixed race girl friend—he is married—to not bring black
players to his games and not appear on her facebook site pictured with black
people.

This private conversation
became public and unleashed a national firestorm of criticism that went far
beyond the sports media. It singed players who were well paid millionaires
employed by a racist billionaire. Here in a sports dominated by the talent of
black players, the owner expressed sentiments quite compatible with an
ante-bellum plantation owner.

Today in all walks of
corporate and sports life, executives, players and coaches can be fired or
severely reprimanded for racist and sexist comments. The Sterling problem posed
the question of whether the same standards applied to the owners of capital,
not just the hired help. The NFL was grappling with a much lower profile issue
of whether Jim Irsay the owner of the Indianapolis Colts should be allowed to
return to executive status after drunk driving indictments.

The power dynamic changed here
as the players union got involved and prominent black coaches spoke out. BomaniJones had identified Sterling’s consistent racist history of employment and
discrimination in 2006; now this information entered the public domain again
and fed the firestorm. Other owners who knew little or had sat passively by
were embarrassed by the plantation imagery and Sterling’s words and actions. Minority
coaches demanded action; players, caught between very high salaries and fear of
losing a year or two off their very short careers, had little to say but relied
upon the union and coaches. The story
had legs and Sterling’s protector David Stern no longer had his back.

It is important to remember
that the NBA is corporate association with strong rules on membership and
behavior with the ability to wrest control of franchises away and ban coaches
and player and even owners from participation in the sport. The new
Commissioner Adam Silver took full advantage of these corporate powers.

Adam Silver had no patience
with the moral ugliness implied in Sterling’s words and history. He consulted
the players and union and acted decisively.

Silver expressed his “moral
outrage” at the “hateful opinions.” He publically apologized to the black
community and players and especially to Magic Johnson who had been singled out
by Sterling. Silver orchestrated a “lifetime ban” from Sterling participating
in the operation of the team or even going to games. The owners unanimously
supported him. With some grumbling they also followed him to force a sale of
the team upon Sterling. At this point it became complicated and was revealed
that Sterling’s own judgment might be impaired—suddenly four weeks later the
Clippers had been bought for a record amount and the case was over

Sterling’s befuddled racist
comments to his mixed race girl friend resulted in the ownership group setting
new boundaries upon the racist behavior and rhetoric of owners of professional
sports teams with their symbolic and community stewardship responsibilities.
The full weight of this sudden precedent may play out later; but here the
culture wars have moved into the owner’s suite. The owners themselves probably
do not understand the full implications of the new rules they have set for
themselves and will probably migrate to other professional sports leagues.

An owner was removed and
forced to sell. Capital attacked capital; billionaires policed billionaires and
stated that ownership of NBA teams, and by implications public professional
sports teams, involved a level of public stewardship about race and inclusion
that the league and owners would now enforce, not just on employees, but upon
owners themselves.

The actions of the NBA, to be
honest, make the drafting of Sam pale by comparison. Sam’s drafting represents
one more breakthrough against a set of collapsing dams around the country on
gay exclusion; but the Silver and NBA action against an owner changed the rules
of the game.

This precedent demands that
rhetorical and behavioral respect for individuals and groups extend not just to
players and managers, but to how the real powers frame their rhetoric and
judgments.

About Me

I teach at the University of Washington where I served as the faculty athletic representative. I created Point of the Game as a chance to reflect upon upon the role of sport in our society. Point of the Game seeks to be a conversation about about the nature of ethics in athletics and its relation to our human condition.